The Homily

This page is not intended as a homily preparation aid, but as a resource for those who would like to continue reflecting on the Sunday readings in the days that follow.

Second Sunday of Advent

You may have noticed that the Gospel of Mark we just heard includes a clear reference to our first reading from Isaiah: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight’. This echoes Isaiah’s statement ‘make straight in the desert a highway for  our God’.  Isaiah was adressing himself to the Jewish exiles in Babylon; Mark was repeating the call to conversion of John the Baptist, to the Jews of his own time. In both cases preparation for some form of rejuvenation, some form of good news was the issue. This is also the message the readings have for us in our turn this advent. We too are being promised good news and called to allow it happen by ‘making a straight way for our God’.

In Babylon the Jews had been languishing as exiles for over half a century; they’d been deported there after the Babylonians had sacked their city, Jerusalem, and destroyed their temple, the epicenter of their life and religion. So, this life and their privileged relations with God seemed as good as dead. As the generations slipped by they felt abandoned by Him in whom they had trusted to protect them against all ills, no matter how they behaved. What really tempted them were the glories around them. The hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, built  to cheer up King Nebuchadrezzar’s wife; the great staged ziggurat, with walls around it fifteen metres thick and a shrine to a pagan god on top; it was claimed  ‘to be the foundation of heaven and earth’; and the so-called the Tower of Babel. Perhaps what most provoked their frustration was the long, paved Highway, or Processional Way, where, between high walls lined with the figures of 120 lions, pagan gods were carried victoriously every New Year festival. It was in this capital of pagandom that Isaiah’s cry reached the Jews as they were gradually turning away from God, gradually closing their minds to Him and letting their faith grow cold; maybe they were tempted to join the mob. A moment more and it might have been too late; hence  the urgency in that reading from Isaiah: ‘Comfort, comfort my people!’ And then comes the release from Babylon, with the help of divine intervention. There is alot of archeological and historical evidence to support this surprise development.  And the Jews did make their  way back, through the desert lands of modern day Iraq and Syria, to reinstate themselves in Jerusalem, build a temple for their  animal sacrifices and resume following the 623 precepts of the Torah.

But Mark’s gospel, and the person of John the Baptist, take up a deeper meaning of this trek through the wilderness . For the Baptist, the issue is not just the end of a terrestial exile and the restoration a former regime; for him something radically new is on the horizon, though he didn’t understand it yet. It was the beginning of a new era, a fundamentally new relationship between God and his people, the beginning of the end-time. For the  Baptist there is a call to profound conversion, a reorientation of one’s life, symbolised by a cleansing baptism in the Jordan river; for him the trek to Jerusalem was figurative, a metaphor for a deeper reality, one that also connects with us in our times, this advent.

What is your greatest temptation? Each person has his or her own answer. We could, for example, start to believe in a part of this world as our homeland, like those exiles in Babylon did, and that God has abandoned  us; that we may as well just settle down and make the most of our time here. There are many business projects that would  like us to buy into that perspective. Or we may be tempted to believe ourselves as transient as any other organism; nothing can be done to prevent our personal extinction and passing into oblivion. Isaiah suggested as much in a line omitted from today’s reading: ‘all flesh is grass, and all beauty is like the flower of the field.. ...The grass withers, the flower fades,’ but then he added:  ‘the word of our God will stand for ever’.  That word has always been a word of life; the word that made the universe, the word of promise through the prophets. It is the word  of hope that, to start with, got the Jews up and moving out of their restricted world. It is the word of invitation offered by John the Baptist to move us out of exiles of our own kinds and thus to recognise Christ for what he is. We are invited to remain open towards what is above, towards God. We are invited to step out of an over-furnished, crammed world and recognise the eternal horizon of our  lives. 

Advent invites us to be open to the profoundly good news that God loves us enough to come among us Himself. It amounts to the recognition that God is love, as Saint John says. It takes a loving person to recognise love for what it is; there is a bare minimum of generosity and goodwill that we need to recognise Christ for what he is. We are called to this good  will in this  season and to express it in very practical  forms to one and all. It is as loving persons that we will recognise him, and grow more like him. We will indeed then belong in his company and  spread the radiance that is his.